In some dark corners, The Birth of a Nation might be received as enthusiastically today as it was when it debuted in 1915. The silent dramatization of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction was the first American motion picture to be screened at the White House, with President Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet in attendance. While violent racism is not tolerated so openly as it was during Wilson’s day, vintage white nationalism is making a comeback in the Trump era.

Richard Spencer, the most prominent white supremacist in America, led a group of torch-bearing demonstrators last week to protest the removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia. During the last month, neo-Confederate alt-right rallies have popped up in Lexington, New Orleans, and other cities, like the opening scenes of a dark reboot of D.W. Griffith’s pioneering piece of propaganda. The Birth of a Nation is as relevant now as it has been at any point over the last century.

That’s why, on Tuesday, the artist and musician DJ Spooky is performing his own version of The Birth of a Nation at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Rebirth of a Nation, his multimedia reimagining of the silent film, includes an ambitious soundtrack performed live, much as the original 1915 screenings sometimes did. It’s a piece that he’s staged on occasion since 2004. Now, with the renewed prominence of virulent white supremacy, the themes resonate more strongly than they did just a summer ago, when he staged the piece at Chicago’s Millennium Park.

“These things are all heartbreakingly, eerily, part of the contemporary landscape,” says DJ Spooky, also known as That Subliminal Kid, or by his given name, Paul D. Miller. “It’s not so far in the rearview mirror.”

For his performance at the Kennedy Center, the Washington, D.C., native will appear on stage with three screens. He’ll be remixing the visuals, manipulating the original film, and adding snippets of touched-up or contemporary video. Miller composed an original score for Rebirth of a Nation to be performed live by two violins, viola, and cello, motifs that he samples and loops with beats to create a sonic soundscape. (Kronos Quartet recorded Rebirth of a Nation with Miller, but for the Kennedy Center performance he will be joined by a D.C. ensemble called Sound Impact.)*

(DJ Spooky/The Kennedy Center)

Miller tells me that he looked to Joseph Carl Breil for inspiration for the score. Breil, the son of a Prussian immigrant and one of the first composers to make music specifically for films, composed a three-hour soundtrack for the original Birth of a Nation. Miller describes it as an early, pivotal accomplishment in remix culture. Breil borrowed from both Dixieland tunes and traditional composers such as Richard Wagner for his score, combining vernacular heartland music with classical continental melodies. In fact, Miller attributes Hollywood’s embrace of Wagner at least in part to Breil’s popular adaptation of his themes.

“I wanted as much as possible to think about the trajectory of The Birth of a Nation through the mass-media landscape,” he says. “Francis Ford Coppola uses ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now. He says that he was inspired to do that by watching Birth of a Nation. You have Star Wars. George Lucas said he studied Birth of a Nation’s battle scenes for inspiration for Star Wars. The Imperial March, dum, dum, dum, dut-dut-a-dum—that’s an appropriation of Wagner as well.”

Miller shares an academic sense of admiration for the technical artistry of the work of Griffith (and Wagner, and Breil). Rebirth of a Nation is Miller’s own Gesamtkunstwerk, the Wagnerian term for “total art”—at least, in scope, it is his most ambitious multimedia project to date. He frames his performance as a protest or a piece of “counter-propaganda,” but also as a project that struggles seriously with its source material. “By using their tools against themselves, you get some intriguing effects,” he says.

Miller’s work to adapt The Birth of a Nation led to an even broader historical project. He is the executive producer for Pioneers of African-American Cinema, a five-volume collection of digitally restored cinematic works by early black filmmakers from the 1920–40s. Released last summer and now streaming on Netflix, the collection draws on film archives from the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the University of California Los Angeles Film & Television Archive, and other libraries. Pioneers compiles almost 20 hours of so-called “race films.” Miller and other musicians, including the composer Makia Matsumura and the late drummer Max Roach, contributed new and original scores for silent works.

The Birth of a Nation was another “race film,” one that was received simply as a film in its day. Miller’s Rebirth of a Nation is in the simplest sense an effort to highlight how its skewed imagery still persists a century later. More critically, it’s a look back at the dawn of alternative facts in a moving-pictures format. The groundbreaking film was a blockbuster hit with popular audiences, even though it was reviled by critics and led to protests by the newly formed NAACP. Its white supporters answered black protesters not with counterarguments but with violence, riots, and even murder.

“The whole idea here is that cinema deeply conditions our response to the everyday world. Everyone is watching different kinds of news. It’s like multiple parallel universes, where you have no authentic engagement of facts or reality,” Miller says. “Birth of a Nation was considered to be a true story.”

*This article originally stated that the Kronos quartet frequently performs Rebirth of a Nation with Miller. We regret the error.

Most Popular

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”